Apache Subversion vs. GitHub

Subversion solves our software versioning problem by providing tools for conflict resolution when doing collaborative work on the same files and projects. We use it with TortoiseSVN and it works great for some of our projects with smaller teams. However, we have a need to make code reviews more and it is a little more difficult to do that in SVN, compared to Bitbucket and Git.

Incentivized

I’ve worked with Github my entire career and view it as an essential part. As a Product manager it allows me to keep track of my features, epics, issues and QA. It is easy to set up and integrate with tools such as intercom or notion.

Incentivized

• Track and control concurrent versions of the same files.
• Has good support from many different software, including visualization, DevOps toolchain.
• Well documented and understood by developers as it has been around for a long time.

Incentivized

• Version control: GitHub provides a powerful and flexible Git-based version control system that allows teams to track changes to their code over time, collaborate on code with others, and maintain a history of their work.
• Code review: GitHub's pull request system enables teams to review code changes, discuss suggestions and merge changes in a central location. This makes it easier to catch bugs and ensure that code quality remains high.
• Collaboration: GitHub provides a variety of collaboration tools to help teams work together effectively, including issue tracking, project management, and wikis.

• Refactoring the layout of a respoitory--or a part of a repository--can be a bit painful, especially for users with workspaces associated with the affected part of the repository. Not sure what could be done to make that better, but it would be nice if something was possible.
• Folks coming from Git can have problems using Subversion. Again, not sure anything can (or should) be done to address that, but it is occasionally an issue.

Incentivized

• Not an easy tool for beginners. Prior command-line experience is expected to get started with GitHub efficiently.
• Unlike other source control platforms GitHub is a little confusing. With no proper GUI tool its hard to understand the source code version/history.
• Working with larger files can be tricky. For file sizes above 100MB, GitHub expects the developer to use different commands (lfs).
• While using the web version of GitHub, it has some restrictions on the number of files that can be uploaded at once. Recommended action is to use the command-line utility to add and push files into the repository.

While there are interesting alternatives, such a GIT, Subversion has been a breath of fresh air compared to its predecessors like CVS or Microsoft Source Safe (now called Team Foundation Server). Its ease of use and high adoption rate is going to keep me using this product for years to come.

GitHub's ease of use and continued investment into the Developer Experience have made it the de facto tool for our engineers to manage software changes. With new features that continue to come out, we have been able to consolidate several other SaaS solutions and reduce the number of tools required for each engineer to perform their job responsibilities.

GitHub is a clean and modern interface. The underlying integrations make it smooth to couple tasks, projects, pull requests and other business functions together. The insights and reporting is really strong and is getting better with every release. GitHub's PR tooling is strong for being web based, i do believe a better code editor would rival having to pull merge conflicts into local IDE.

Incentivized

It's a testament to how easy it is to use GitHub and how many others use it that you can pretty much find the answer to any problem you have by searching online. Consequently, I've never needed to use their support. It's an incredibly easy tool to set up initially, so it won't require much onboarding expertise to get started.

Incentivized

After Microsoft Visual SourceSafe was discontinued, we chose Subversion and it was a great choice. We were able to migrate to Apache Subversion very quickly and easily and benefited immediately from its non-locking workflow (SourceSafe required users to "lock" the file when editing to prevent editing conflicts from other users, whereas Subversion allows multiple users to edit the same file simultaneously and then merge conflicts later.)

While we still use Apache Subversion for our legacy projects, we've migrated to Git and GitHub for our new projects as that is the new "cool kid" and it provides some benefits such as distributed and offline development. But Git is more complex than Apache Subversion and not as easy to learn.

Incentivized

GitHub comes handy in terms of usage and capabilities, it is easy to use and quite a user friendly tools when it comes to user experience, with limited UI/UX and it has vast exposure when it comes to third party integration and being quite mature and yet evolving and popular tool many other platform provide easy integration with the platform and make first choice for many tools architects.

Incentivized

• It allowed us to deliver the right files to our customer without "clobbering" previous releases, making for a far more satisfied customer.
• It allowed our developers to work on two releases in parallel (plus an occasional third, for emergency fixes).
• With some simple hooks, it allowed us to set up a system where code was was automatically deployed to test servers as soon as developers committed it, making testing easier. This was made easier by virtue of being a ColdFusion project, which requires no compilation. However, that is possible for compiled code with a continuous integration system like Jenkins.

Incentivized

• GitHub has made branching much easier for our dev team. Easy branching makes it easier for us to gain all the benefits of source control while giving us the flexibility to decide what features/branches we want to go in any particular release.
• Integration with third-party tools like Azure DevOps has allowed us to streamline workflows and gain the benefits of automated testing whenever a commit is made.
• GitHub has also raised visibility with its integration with our Sprint boards. We can easily jump to a commit from a work item.

Incentivized